The company I work for publishes large technical specifications and we have been successfully producing PDFs with navigational bookmarks from Word documents since, oh, the last century. In the past few months, when following the same exact procedure we always have, instead of just heading levels producing bookmarks on the left-hand side of the PDFs, they now also include Table Captions and Figure Captions.

Several members of our team have the same problem, so we know it's not an individual configuration. The first thing everyone thought of was to check and see which styles were marked to create bookmarks. Only standard Heading styles are selected; no table caption nor figure caption. However, Adobe inserts those bookmarks anyway. Note that we created custom styles for our table and figure captions which has never been a problem before, and they are definitely not selected in our preferences.

We've tried "Save as PDF" and using Adobe PDFmaker. We've been using Word 2010 for several years without this problem in our PDFs. Has anyone else encountered this problem recently? (The only problem we ran into a few years ago was when we created bookmarks, some of the lines in our graphics disappeared which Adobe admitted was a bug in one of their upgrades. It has since been corrected, but am now wondering if this was another upgrade glitch.)

Short of manually going into the bookmarks and deleting the ones we don't want (painful), any ideas on a good fix?

Thanks for the assist!

Chris

2014-08-19, 23:59

Andrew Lockton

I haven't seen your problem but I would suspect that the caption styles have an outline level applied to them. Is that the case?

2014-08-20, 16:17

cpoland

Under Format--Numbering, our caption styles is set to "None". We do use field codes to number them if that is what you mean about outline level applied. We use the standard auto-numbered outline Headings but have our own custom headings for Annexes and Appendices. Here are some examples of our captions:

To add to the weirdness, after checking with my team and performing yet another test, bookmarks are only being inserted for the Table captions, not the Figure captions (so my original problem statement wasn't completely correct). However, note that I'm using the same field code in both the table and figures.

My mind just went numb...

2014-08-20, 18:59

Andrew Lockton

It is not the fields that I am suggesting you check - check the style definitions for the paragraphs which are appearing as bookmarks.

Typically the settings for creating a PDF with (acrobat) bookmarks relies on the outline level of a paragraph. If you open the Format Paragraph dialog (Click the little icon in the bottom right corner of the Paragraph group on the Home tab) you can see what outline level is applied to a paragraph. This is the setting that generally determines the hierarchy of the bookmarks in the PDF. My guess is that your style for Table captions is not set to an outline level of 'Body Text'. The outline level of each paragraph shows quickly if you put your document into Outline View - are the captions appearing with an elevated outline level?

If you still can't work out what I am talking about, post a cut down sample of your document and I can have a quick look to see if this is the case. Also, please describe which method you are using to create the PDF.